The anti-LGBTQ Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) possibly lost thousands in a stock deal last Friday involving Donald Trump’s new social media venture, and she could lose even more if Trump renegotiates an upcoming merger or if his social media platform flops, experts say.
CNBC reports that Greene bought between $15,000 and $50,000 of stock in the Trump-linked Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) this past Friday, according to public disclosure documents. But in the time since she bought it, it has already lost value.
Related: Marjorie Taylor Greene is seething. Trans kids can use Twitter but she’s been banned.
DWAC announced last week that it would be merging with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the company started by Trump to launch “TRUTH Social” – a social media platform – in 2022.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
“I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” Trump said in a press release announcing the merger. He’s the chairman of TMTG, and he has been fuming for months since he got banned by platforms like Twitter and YouTube for spreading false information about the 2020 elections which led to the Capitol Insurrection on January 6.
“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” Trump said in a statement. “This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon.”
After the merger was announced last Wednesday, DWAC’s stock shot up by over 800% due to the hype. Greene bought stock on Friday, the day that the stock already started losing value.
DWAC opened on Friday at $118.80 per share and dropped as low as $67.96, according to CNBC, and has dropped even more in the first part of this week. That means that Greene lost between seven and 47 percent of her investment already, depending on when she bought the stock on Friday.
Greene’s office isn’t commenting on why she bought the stock, instead saying in a statement: “This transaction was reported in compliance with House rules and provides all required details about the transaction.”
Greene has a long history of anti-LGBTQ activism, protesting drag queens before she ran for elected office. But she’s also well-known for believing absurd conspiracy theories, including that California wildfires were started by “lasers” in space connected to Jewish bankers, that Hillary Clinton helped run a pedophilia ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza restaurant, and that the 9/11 attacks were a U.S. government conspiracy.
A solid defender of Trump, Greene has also been banned from Twitter, in her case for spreading false information about COVID-19 and the vaccines.
So it’s not surprising that she would be drawn to invest in a social media platform that Trump promises to launch next year, intended to be a safe space for conservatives to make statements that would be banned from other platforms as hate speech or misinformation.
But TRUTH Social – if it is ever launched – won’t be the first platform for angry conservatives booted off mainstream social media platforms. Apps like Parler and Gab were started for that same purpose and both became havens for white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and various kinds of conspiracy theorists.
Iceberg Research, a group that “identifies substantial earnings misrepresentation and accounting irregularities in financial statements issued by public companies,” said this week that they “see only risks for investors” regarding DWAC stock.
“Based on Trump’s track record, at current price, renegotiation is likely to keep more of the merged company for him,” the financial research group tweeted.
“No opinion on the probability of success of TMTG,” they said, referring to the company promising to launch TRUTH Social, saying that people who bought stock in DWAC “don’t own a piece of this project yet.”
“Trump has the leverage, not them…. Trump will renegotiate at the expense of DWAC retail holders.”
